Quarterly Wrap-up

Money flowed into workforce-as-a-service platforms, and work chat technologies continued their incursion on already-aging social media collaboration tools. Will Microsoft split itself up to better exploit these trends?

Evernote vice president of operations Alexei Rodriguez said the company decided not to go with the cloud because it is four times cheaper to maintain its own data center. But he understands why it appeals to others.

Twitter has inked its first strategic partnership with a carrier that doesn’t involve subsidized data. It will surely be a boost for the microblogging platform in Germany, where it is weak, but the benefits for Deutsche Telekom are less clear.

Now with big backing from Dropbox and Evernote funder Sequoia Capital — and with VC legend Michael Moritz on the 6Wunderkinder board — task-management app Wunderlist should soon become more lightweight and stable, and more widely available.

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/09/25/the-post-it-note-goes-digital-on-evernote/ Evernote is partnering with 3M on a smartphone app that will let users “photograph, store and organize pictures of their Post-its,”…

In a turnaround bid, doo has stopped trying to promote its own cloud storage in version 2.0, opting instead to just be a unified layer of intelligence over other services such as Google Drive and Dropbox.

Evernote is launching an accelerator program that supports companies who are building products that work on Evernote’s platform. The members of the first class will be chosen from among the participants in Evernote Devcup 2013.

Who says paper is worthless in the age of iPad! Moleskine, the favorite notebook of tech people, went public today, and is valued at $626 million. It is a nice windfall for technology investor Index Ventures.

Evernote and Germany’s Deutsche Telekom signed a strategic partnership, with the first fruit being a free year’s Evernote Premium subscription for Telekom customers. That Premium offering now has a new feature, too.

What do they say about all publicity being good publicity! Well, that certainly is true for Evernote, which has seen a growth in downloads and usage of its app since Google announce Keep, another note-taker & clipping app for Android.

Twitter turns seven and gets 200 million users; Hashtag is the new like; Kickstarter and Veronica Mars have a successful date; iWatch or iNot; Keep it away plus some other stories from the week and our Structure highlights.

Marco Arment, who is the co-creator of Tumblr and the brainiac behind Instapaper in his widely read blog disagrees with my take on Google Keep. And here is my response to his response. Actually we both make sense, somehow!

As Punchfork gets ready to shut down its API post Pinterest acquisition, Yummly hopes to step into its shoes, proving recipe content to food sites and apps. Yummly’s semantic search technology, however, has a lot to offer.

What was once a simple task-management service is now starting to expand in functionality. The new Add to Wunderlist browser extension makes the service stickier… and a bit more of a rival to Evernote.

In my quest to create a paperless home, I recently decided to digitize my recipe file. My goal was to create something easily searchable but also, hopefully, fun to browse, just the way a physical recipe file is. Here are the tools I’m using.

Evernote Food wants to be the only food app users need. With the upgrade to Evernote 2.0 for the iPhone and iPad, users can not just remember past meals but get restaurant recommendations and recipe ideas for future meals.

After six months of full-time Chromebook usage, I’m hooked. But working in a browser alone would be difficult if not for some key web extensions. Here are a half-dozen that I use daily and the reasons why they make life for Chromebook users easier.

Yahoo has added Max Levchin, a Silicon Valley star, to its board of directors giving it a much-needed entrepreneurial and engineering-savvy board member. The web portal will also see two of its existing directors leave, shrinking the board to 11 members.

Betaworks’ Findings.com started out as a service to share passages from Kindle books, but with Amazon cracking down on that functionality, the company will now focus on clipping and sharing content from the web.

Looking to try out a new solutions for saving and clipping photos, images and URLs across the web? Consider checking out Clipboard, an app that combines elements of popular web products like Evernote, Instapaper, and Pinterest to create an effective site for saving and sharing.

Evernote is one of the more understated success stories in Silicon Valley. Almost four years old, the digital clipper-locker service is a poster child for freemium business model and much of the credit goes to its CEO Phil Libin, an underrated Silicon Valley star.

Sony’s newest e-reader, the Reader PRS-T2, may appeal mainly due to the $129 price tag. But the ability to share passages on Facebook and integration with Evernote make it even better. Evernote is superb for clipping web content for viewing later on nearly any device.

The $6.99 app brings access to all documents online and off, and uses natural language technology to automatically make keywords, tags and folders. Projectbook is intended to be a simple way to keep any kind of document, appointment, note, presentation, picture or recording in one place.

Note-taking service Springpad wants access to your Facebook profile. Why? It wants to scrape all of those random “likes” of movies, music, restaurants and TV shows scattered throughout your Timeline and organize them into notebooks, which you and your friends can search and share.

Evernote is increasingly looking at how to educate people on the many uses of Evernote and its family of products. That’s one of the big themes of Evernote’s second annual Trunk Conference in August, which will feature a lifestyle series for users.

Netflix stores the master copy of its data in the cloud, and the company’s director of architecture Adrian Cockcroft thinks that startups should do the same thing. Cockcroft shared some of Netflix’s experiences with AWS as part of a guru panel at GigaOM’s Structure conference.

Cooks are increasingly using services like Evernote, Facebook and Pinterest to store their culinary ideas, storing recipes as notes, likes and pins for later viewing. The problem is none of the three is designed to be a culinary tool, but Say Mmm plans to change that.

Online research database ProQuest’s usual customers are libraries and other large institutions that can afford to pay a lot for access. ProQuest’s new cloud-based tool, Udini, aims to make Internet research easy and affordable for everyday people — and builds in some Evernote and Instapaper-inspired features.

Springpad has long been compared to Internet note-taking sensation Evernote, but starting today Springpad will likely be compared to another darling of the startup world, Pinterest. On Wednesday Springpad evolved into its third iteration, transforming the information capture service into a social networking engine.

Mark Ayzenshtat, once a top Google engineer and the co-founder of TellApart, is joining Evernote to lead that company’s data product push. Evernote which makes it easy for users to collect and store notes, video, audio, is about to launch an enterprise push.

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If you spend a lot of time writing in the margins of reports, editing presentations, or filling out endless forms, there’s something you should know: You should be using a tablet for all of these things. Here are four apps to get you on your way.

Microsoft added Android support for OneNote, enabling Android users to take notes from their device and sync them in the cloud. But a few key features are missing that appear in competing apps. Is this space owned by Evernote or can OneNote succeed on Android?

SocialFolders, a freemium application that launched last month to let you store and manage any file created on the social web, rolled out an integration with Evernote on Tuesday that lets users drag-and-drop content such as Tweets, Facebook updates, Instagram photos into their Evernote accounts.

This week, two of the latest Android tablets arrived on my doorstep: An Asus Transformer Prime and a Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7; solid upgrades from last year’s models. Android tablet sales are finally on the rise, mainly on the back of Amazon’s Kindle Fire.

Producteev, a popular task-management tool, is taking a big step forward, updating its web and iPhone apps while launching new Android and Windows desktop apps. The wholesale improvements, which include TaskRabbit integration, help Producteev in its quest to become a universal task management service.

Dolphin Browser, a popular third-party web client for Android devices, is set to get even more popular. On Tuesday, the browser gained two new add-ons: support for both Skitch and Evernote, making it easier to annotate, draw on, or capture web content for saving or sharing.

Evernote, the note-taking and productivity start-up, is introducing a browser extension called Evernote Clearly that offers users a way to isolate a story and present it in a clean view that strips out navigation, ads and links to other content.

We can now check emails on the move, hold video conferences, proof documents and log in to check their bank balance when sitting on the train or working from a cafe. Our obsession has been fueled by just the right apps to help us accomplish these tasks.

Evernote, the popular note-taking app, recently updated its clients on both Mac OS X and iOS, and though there are highs and lows, overall each update brings appreciated improvements. The changes could even upgrade Evernote from bench-warmer to starting player in my daily workflow.

Evernote, the notetaking software program aimed at helping users “remember everything,” has acquired image-sharing app Skitch. The full version of Skitch previously cost $19.99 in the Mac store, but will be free and soon available on “every desktop and mobile platform under the sun.”

Fresh off its $50 million in funding, note-taking and memory service Evernote is preparing for its first-ever developer conference next month, where it will outline its broader strategy and how it plans on becoming a 100-year company by building a productivity platform.

Evernote has pulled in $50 million in new funding led by Sequoia Capital with participation from Morgenthaler Ventures. The new investment, which comes after a $20 million round last year October, will be used for aggressive growth and acquisitions as the company expands its offerings.

In a clever twist, Evernote introduced a new app Wednesday that does something cool using not only the iPad 2 but also one of its constant companions. Evernote Peek uses the Smart Cover to make quiz-taking a little easier, and much more interesting.

After taking 992 days to get to 5 million members, Evernote said today it has now hit 10 million members a mere 208 days later. It’s also eclipsed 400,000 premium members, putting the company well on its way toward its goal of 1 million paid users.

Cloud document storage app OfficeDrop has become known for bringing filing into the modern era, helping users to get away from those pesky manila folders. The company is hoping to make traditional scanning software equally outdated with an upgraded version of its scanning app ScanDrop.

OfficeDrop, an application for scanning, accessing and sharing paper and digital files via the cloud has been rolling out onto a variety of platforms. OfficeDrop Paper-to-Go app for Android is now available, in addition to applications for Mac, PC and iPad.

Bookmarking service Copyto.co not only stores the URLs of the pages you want to save; it allows you to save the content on the page in your account, too. That way, if the page changes, you’ll still have the content stored your Copyto.co account.

Note-taking service Evernote has released a major update to its Android app. It includes document sharing features that make it possible for web workers to use Evernote as a collaboration tool. Meanwhile, its competitor Catch has added a premium version that also includes sharing features.

As part of my efforts to improve my productivity, I’ve been looking for tools that can help me during research. One such tool is Trails, a Firefox add-on that can collect text snippets and images from the web, and structure them into a clean booklet layout

Evernote today launched a redesigned version of its iPhone software, adding new views and features to organize thoughts on the go. Multiple attachments and up to 90 minutes of audio per note are supported as this productivity boosting app helps capture and sift through your thoughts.

For me the revolution started with the iPhone, and once the iPad was fully integrated into my workflow, the dictator had been completely deposed: the hard drive was no longer king. Now syncing solutions keep my digital life in step regardless of my local storage situation.

The Mac App Store saw over 1 million downloads in its first day of availability. That’s a terrific number, but pinning down the effect it’s had for individual developers is a little trickier. Evernote, at least, had tremendous success on launch day.

According to a leaked presentation, Yahoo is planning on shutting down Delicious. That’s bad news for users of the social bookmarking tool, but fortunately there are several excellent alternatives. While none of them is an exact like-for-like replacement, they offer a selection of useful bookmarking features:

Cloud-based note-taking apps are proliferating. Newcomer Catch has joined Evernote, Springpad, Paprika and Simplenote in this space. Like a lot of my WWD colleagues, I’ve been using Evernote. So does Catch offer any features that might induce me to switch?

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Offering freemium versions of mobile apps is a now a full-fledged trend, so shouldn’t all app developers employ the model? Not so fast. The strategy has worked, but it requires understanding of both the market and your product, along with careful thought, planning and a willingness to keep tinkering to ensure a decent payoff.

Online note-taking app maker Evernote today released the beta of the next major version of its client for Mac. It includes a couple of very useful new features: in-app notebook sharing and notebook stacks, which provide a way to organize notebooks.

The folks at Evernote have rolled out version 2.0 of the Android mobile client, a major update that lets premium users keep notebooks on the phone for access without network connectivity. Premium account holders can now download notebooks to the phone for access without the web.

Evernote announced it has raised $20 million, enabling it to expand on its mission to capture memories and ideas in the cloud. The new round of funding will allow for faster product development and expansion into new markets and validates Evernote’s freemium model.

If your primary goal at conferences is to learn, then note-taking is essential. But how can you focus on note taking when you have other things on your mind such as networking and the other sessions you have to attend?

I’ve been an enthusiastic Evernote user for quite a while, but until recently I didn’t think of it in terms of a collaboration tool. However, the web-based notebook tool’s evolution has made it far more useful as a base for collaboration than anyone might expect.

FolderBoy is a web-based note-taking app that sits somewhere between the bare-bones functionality of Paprika and the kitchen-sink approach taken by Evernote. As you might expect from the name, FolderBoy encourages users to create folders to organize notes. You can even create folders within folders.

Germany’s TV networks are getting ready to compete with Hulu before the U.S. site has even launched in Europe: The RTL Group and the Pro 7 Sat 1 Media AG plan to open their own Hulu-like site, offering catch-up TV for up to seven days.

Evernote is my dumping ground for research ideas, quick notes, and web pages I’ve come across on the Internet and want to save for future reading. When Evernote announced its new Trunk service on Wednesday, I was immediately skeptical and derisive.

The handy digital memory software maker Evernote today is launching “Evernote Trunk,” a platform for integrated productivity applications that it will sync with, market and sell. The company hopes to share the success of its freemium business model with developers who integrate with its service.

The tablet space continues to heat up with Microsoft stating tablets are on track for this year. The folks behind Evernote have released ritePen 4.0 in anticipation of these tablets. This program brings finger handwriting and touch control to any Windows 7 touch system.

Any large project I’m working on, general reference notes, or stuff I just might normally bookmark ends up in Evernote. Over time, I’ve formed a few habits to help me get the most out of Evernote and I thought I’d share them with you.

Evernote is an example of the way the cloud can be leveraged to best advantage. Users of the Evernote premium service have gotten an upgrade that adds two improvements — note history (versioning) and larger note limits. Rolling back to earlier versions is now possible.

Back in early March, I revisited Fluid for OS X. Today I’m making the rounds with old software friends again, this time with Evernote. I tried Evernote when it first came out for Mac, and again when the iPhone version arrived, but neither took hold in my daily workflow. Now I’m trying again.

After iPad announcement day, I provoked a lot of controversy by writing that I felt that the iPad could serve as a travel computer for me. After handling it and trying out its features, I’m now even more convinced that is true.

Don’t spend money on marketing, do offer flexibility and data exporting to eliminate buyers’ regret, make sure to capitalize on and value goodwill, and only charge for things that are hard to do. These were the lessons of successful startups at today’s Freemium Summit.

Nozbe, the online Getting Things Done (GTD)-based project management tool, announced integration with Evernote last week. This is yet another worthy third-party integration where a service benefits from the power and flexibility Evernote offers.

Over on our sister blog jkOnTheRun, Kevin has written about a small but productivity-boosting tweak to Evernote. You’ve always been able to email notes into your Evernote account using a special incoming address, but you can now email them into specific notebooks simply by using tags in the subject line.

Just when I thought Evernote couldn’t get any better, it does. The information collection service always supported email entry of notes, but now you can specify which notebook to capture data to. And the new hashtag feature offers customized tags for your notes.

Apple’s iPad won’t support native handwriting recognition, which has disappointed many potential purchasers. This could be due to the lighter OS or CPU, but there are some potential solutions to get around this. Maybe the client-server model will be reborn for handwriting on the iPad.

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Our recent survey of tech early adopters and Apple enthusiasts revealed that 59 percent of Apple enthusiasts and 67 percent of mobile enthusiasts see handwriting recognition technology as a must-have feature for a tablet device. As introduced, the iPad does not offer HWR, but it’s something Apple should think about adding to increase its appeal in educational, enterprise and other specialized markets.

The Evernote system is already pretty easy, but a new partnership with printer maker Lexmark looks to make it even easier. Certain Lexmark printers with integrated scanners can now access a “Scan to Evernote” option, thus scanning any document directly to the Evernote cloud.

Tablet PC enthusiasts have long been taking handwritten notes on the computer screen using OneNote from Microsoft. The ability to search handwritten notes in OneNote is powerful. A simple method exists that anyone can use with paper notes to make them searchable. Here’s how.

Notes themselves are often quite personal. For example, when I go into a client meeting, I am there from a technical documentation standpoint, and my notes reflect that. The result is that “knowledge islands” can form as everyone hoards their own notes.

Evernote, a Mountain View, Calif.-based startup, says that Nokia has developed a version of its web service that allows users to capture and store information using the built-in sharing functionality of the N900. It is made possible using a plug-in using the Evernote API.

This week, Google gave its employees a new phone that’s based on future Android technology, hacks of the Android-based Nook e-reader were made, Evernote was launched for the platform and reports emerged that Motorola’s Backflip may be the first Android phone on AT&T’s network.

Evernote, a Mountain View, Calif.-based company that makes my favorite cross-platform app, is all set to release the final Android version of it. It will be available for download in the Android market sometime today.

Freemium -– a business model that works by offering basic services for free but charging for premium features — is being viewed as the new way to do business in startup land. It has its champions and its detractors. But if you want to make it work for your startup, here are some tips.